UK
West Midlands Police reveal what they think is driving knife crime – amid family’s shock at age of killers
“Brave” and “funny” with a “weird sense of humour” is how Shana Seesahai describes her older brother Shawn.
Growing up on the small Caribbean Island of Anguilla, the two siblings developed an extremely close bond. Shawn was very protective of his little sister, five years his junior.
“Almost every day I wake up and think about him. My mind just goes on him immediately,” says Shana, 15.
“In my mind I don’t feel like he’s passed away, I know he has, but it doesn’t feel like that.”
Shawn was beaten and stabbed to death with a machete by two 12-year-old boys on 13 November 2023 in Wolverhampton. He was 19 years old.
He’d travelled to the UK for cataract surgery and was planning on building a life in the West Midlands. He was murdered the day before he was due to start a course in engineering in Birmingham.
Shawn had phoned his younger sister earlier that day.
Shana Seesahai
She remembers: “He called me in school in break time, and he asked me how I was and stuff like that. A few minutes later we finished talking and he told me that he loves me and we’ll talk later. But then it didn’t come.
“That was the last day that he told me that he loved me.”
Shana cannot understand why Shawn was murdered.
“It’s shocking. Wow, 12 years old?! It doesn’t make sense, it’s just crazy.”
Family scattered Shawn Seesahai’s ashes on his favourite beach
Shawn’s murderers, both now 13, can’t be named for legal reasons.
They will be sentenced on 27 September at Nottingham Crown Court. They are the youngest ever knife killers in the UK.
Adam, (not his real name), knows them both.
“It was just shocking,” he says.
“I thought [one of the boys] was going to grow up to be a basketballer or something. I didn’t expect him to do something like that.”
He describes the other boy who killed Shawn as a “bad breed”.
Adam is 14. He says it’s common for children to carry knives in this area and admits he sometimes goes out with knives after being threatened with blades multiple times.
“I can’t let that happen again. It’s real life. It’s nothing fake. It’s not nothing to joke about because you can get killed.”
The CCTV footage of the attack on Shawn is too grainy to know what truly happened.
CCTV footage examined by police investigating the murder
Shawn and his killers were strangers and Shawn’s murder seems to have been completely unprovoked.
He was unarmed, while they had a machete. The boy who owned the weapon had posed with it earlier that day for a photo that was uploaded to Snapchat.
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The West Midlands has the highest rate of knife crime in the country.
Inspector Colin Gallier leads West Midlands Police’s youth violence and knife crime team. He says social media has become a “massively powerful tool” in fuelling knife crime in the region.
“Certainly, we do see young people and groups and gangs promoting themselves, almost mimicking other target rival gangs and that itself incites violence, an opportunity for them to raise their profile and potentially intimidate others as well,” he says.
But there is no suggestion Shawn was involved with gangs. He was simply, and tragically, in the wrong place at the wrong time.
So why is knife violence so high in the West Midlands?
A machete hidden under a bed, which was found by officers investigating the killing
“It’s poverty-driven,” says Malachi Nunes, who mentors young people in the region in an effort to reduce knife crime. He has worked with children as young as nine years old.
“When you see the area they’re from… low income. That’s kind of the driver behind a lot of these things,” he adds.
“Some of the youths carry knives because they want to go rob someone else for something they don’t have, and because there are some other youths that are doing the same thing. When they both meet up it’s a case of who’s backing down first.”
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Inspector Gallier says when he asks young people why they carry knives, he often hears that it’s for protection.
On patrol with the inspector and his team in Birmingham city centre, we see this play out when a member of the public reports seeing someone armed with a blade.
After chasing him down, officers search him and find a large kitchen knife hidden in the leg of his tracksuit bottoms.
“We’ve done some immediate police checks and from our records, it seems that this individual has been the victim of street robberies in the past,” says Inspector Gallier.
The boy they’ve arrested is just 15 years old.